Preached March 30, 2008, the Second Sunday of Easter, at The First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, UCC
I Peter 1:3-9 John 20:19-31
Dedicated to Senator Barack Obama, with gratitude for his recent speech regarding race in America; and always to the glory of God.
Jesus says to Thomas “stop doubting and believe,” and I believe that the risen Jesus may bring the same message to every one of us in a particular moment of revelation along our journey. “Stop doubting and believe.” But to understand this story, I think that we need to understand what it means that Thomas was doubting, because there are different kinds of doubt. Thomas had what I call faithful doubt. This kind of doubting is good, even essential, and Jesus was not critical of it. We all need faithful doubt.
Listen to these voices that see faith with clarity.
The author Jose Bergamin wrote that “a belief which leaves no place for doubt is not a belief; it is a superstition.”
The theologian Paul Tillich, who did his most important work during the volatile times of the 2nd world war and the beginning of the nuclear age said that doubt is not the opposite of faith, it is an element of faith.
And finally, Frederick Buechner put it very succinctly. He told us that doubt is the “ants in the pants of faith.” It keeps us from getting too comfortable, or complacent.
Faithful doubt is that part of us that knows we don’t know everything. It allows us to have questions, and to re-examine even the things that we already think we know. I hope that when we reached the age of 25 (or will reach it), we don’t have the same view of God or of the world, or even of ourselves as we did at age fifteen. And I hope that our understanding is always growing, year by year. We can only do that if we have some faithful doubt about the views we used to hold.
Faithful doubt contains a humility about our own knowledge. It allows us to say, “I could be wrong.” And we need to say that. Think of this in terms simple things like lost keys or a remote control. When you say “I know it’s somewhere in this room!” saying “I could be wrong” is the first step to finding what you have lost. Now think in terms of family arguments, especially those that have dragged on for months and years, if only someone would say “I could be wrong.” Think of political, partisan battles: “I could be wrong.” May we always have enough humility, enough doubt, to say “I could be wrong.”
When doubt is absent, we are dangerously close to humanity’s darkest side. When the rabbi Sheila Peltz went to visit the site of the concentration camp at Auschwitz, where so many of her fellow Jews had been tortured and killed, she understood the importance of doubt. Listen to her words. “As I stood before the gates, I realized that I never want to be as certain about anything as were the people who built this place.”
We need a bit of faithful doubt, to keep us honest, to keep us searching. In fact, to keep searching is what makes this kind of doubt faithful, and makes it different from what I would call cynical doubt. Faithful doubt keeps asking questions and searching for answers, while cynical doubt raises objections and offers dismissals. Cynical doubt leaves no room for being wrong, or to be convinced by new discoveries. If you have a difference of opinion with a cynical doubter, there’s no use talking to them except to waste your time. The only thing you can do is to just show them kindness and love, which is never a waste of time.
Thomas is a faithful doubter. He says that he needs to see Jesus himself, to see his wounds. He says that he does not believe that Jesus has been raised, but even so, he sticks with the disciples for seven long days, which is how long it takes before Jesus returns to see them again. That must have been one long week. A cynical doubter would have said “I’m not going to believe what you say and I’m not wasting my time waiting for proof that will never come. I’m out of here.”
To the cynical doubter in each of us, I would say this. Don’t just doubt your belief. Doubt your disbelief. When you disbelieve that praying will get you anywhere; when you disbelieve that going on a mission tour to repair just a couple of homes in all of Appalachia will make much difference, or that an extra ten dollars a month in your offering will do much good; when you disbelieve that anyone could really love you unconditionally just as you are, with everything you have done; when you disbelieve, get some doubt. Say “maybe I’m wrong about that.” Maybe I’m looking to prayer for the wrong results; maybe I’m calculating the value of my service and offering too harshly; maybe God really is as close to us as Jesus proclaimed. You have to ask yourselves, are my reasons for disbelieving really any better than the reasons to believe? Or is disbelief just easier?
I read an article about the world of modern magicians, the ones who do tricks with their hands right in front of you, the ones who ask you to pick a card, write your name on it, and when you have put it back in the deck they pull it out from the pocket of your friend’s coat. What the magicians said is that the point of their magic is not to trick you into believing that magic is real. We all know, when we watch them, that there is some technique to the trick. The hat has a false bottom; the card was up their sleeve. And so the effect is that we watch them work, we know it is some kind of trick, and yet our minds cannot conceive of the way the trick is pulled off. They lead us down a mental highway to which there are no exits, and at the end of the trick, the effect is not that we believe the playing card was magically teleported somewhere, the effect is that we have been made aware of the limits of our own understanding. We are reminded that in life, there are some things that our minds cannot fully grasp, and yet we do know one thing: Yes, that is my card.
How much do you need to know about God in order to believe, in order to give more of yourself to God in worship, thanksgiving, prayer, and service? What do you need to see before you can say “yes, that’s my card.”
Thomas said he wanted to see and touch the wounds that Jesus received when he was killed. And what does Jesus do with Thomas, who refuses to take their word for it, who refuses to believe what his fellow disciples are telling him, who sets these conditions on his belief? Jesus comes to him and offers him what he needs. “Here,” he says, “see the places where I was pierced, put your hand here and touch these scars.” But Thomas doesn’t need to touch them anymore. Thomas proclaims “my Lord and my God.” In all of the gospel of John, Thomas is the one who finally, and most clearly states the identity of Jesus Christ. “My Lord and my God.”
But what about the rest of us? Thomas saw Jesus and saw his wounds. But then Jesus said “blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.” I think that John was very careful to include that line, because he was writing his gospel about 60-70 years after Jesus had risen, and he must have known many people who believed in Jesus without ever seeing his wounded body. How did they come to believe? It was not be because God made all their wishes come true, and it was not because God saved them from the pain of life. Believing in God isn’t about a shortcut to a carefree life. So how will we come to believe?
Think about Thomas again. He wanted to see the wounds of Jesus. In one sense, he may have been looking for proof that this man who claimed to be Jesus was really the same one who had been killed. But maybe the wounds were more than proof that the resurrection wasn’t a trick. Maybe the wounds were the evidence he needed to see that death had really lost its hold on us. With the wounds of the cross, Jesus suffered judgment, punishment, and death, but when the risen Jesus shows Thomas the wounds that no longer hurt him, we know that he has freed us from judgment, freed us from the system of punishment, and freed us from death. The risen Christ shows us that grace will make each of us whole.
Isn’t that what we are looking for, the way to be made whole? After all that we suffer, after all that we have done wrong, after every mistake or misguided path, God can make us whole. When we see that, then we can believe. In the meantime, let our doubt be faithful, let us hold our questions before us as we search together. It turns out that in our searching, God will find us.
Monday, March 31, 2008
Sunday, March 23, 2008
Sermon - The State of Confusion
Preached Marrch 23, 2008, Easter Sunday at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, Ohio, UCC at the sunrise service.
Mark 16:1-8
Dedicated to my wife Betsy; and always to the glory of God.
Years ago in Disneyland there was an attraction called Circle-vision which showed movies on a 360 degree screen. Before the show, a host would point out to the audience the state flags that were hung on the walls. One by one they were lit up to see if the audience could identify it, and to welcome anyone who was visiting from that state. After awhile, the light would shine on a very unusual flag covered with strange symbols, and the host would say “and what state is this?” Silence. “This flag,” he said, “is for the state of confusion.”
The state of confusion: what a terrible place to be. We don’t like confusion. We want to know where we are and where we are going. Confusion is not something that we can settle into for very long.
The gospel according to Mark, like all ancient writings, was copied by hand in order to be reproduced and circulated, and we have several copies from early centuries. The ending of the gospel presents us with a puzzle. The women come to the empty tomb, where they learn from an angelic messenger that Jesus isn’t there, that he has risen. He tells them to “go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.” Then, Mark tells us, “they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”
That’s how the gospel ends in the earliest manuscripts. No appearance of the risen Jesus. Nothing about the women ever speaking up. No further mention of the disciples, who fled when Jesus was arrested in the garden and haven’t been seen since, except for Peter who followed long enough to deny that he ever knew Jesus. Mark just ends with the message of Easter being proclaimed to these women, and them fleeing the tomb in terror and amazement, not saying a thing.
That’s not a comfortable ending. If that ending showed up in Hollywood, the studio would make a new one. And, in a way, that’s just what happened. When we read manuscripts that come from later decades and centuries, another paragraph follows the confusing ending we just heard. In this ending, the risen Jesus appears to Mary Magdalene, to two disciples on a country road, and to the eleven disciples gathered at a table, which is kind of a summary of the stories from the other gospels. We can’t go back and discover exactly why the extra ending began to appear in copies of Mark, but a prevailing theory, the one that makes most sense to me, is that someone was too uncomfortable with the confusion caused by that ending. What was the risen Jesus like? What did he say and do? How do we explain what happened? And, if the women were afraid to speak, then how did anyone learn their story in the first place?
Someone wanted a cleaner ending, and we may want a cleaner ending. We may want Easter to just make sense, to have clear applications for our lives. But there us a danger to oversimplifying our lives. Life is too complex and unpredictable to be boiled down to easy lessons, or simplistic definitions right and wrong, good and bad. I think we need Mark’s telling of the Easter story because it leaves us in the state of confusion. It leaves us in that tension of not being able to understand exactly what Easter means, not knowing exactly what we are supposed to feel, or think, or do about it. And that’s ok. There is a blessing in the state of confusion.
The psychologist M. Scott Peck, who wrote that great book The Road Less Traveled, and many others, remembered people who would come to him for counseling, and when he asked them what was troubling them, they would say “I’m confused!”
Scott would say “congratulations, that’s wonderful!”
That’s not really what you want to hear from your counselor.
“It’s not wonderful – it’s terrible! I don’t know what my life has meant, or what I’m supposed to do next. The things I thought were important haven’t worked out and I have nothing to hold on to anymore. I’m confused, and it is painful and difficult!”
Then Scott would say something like this: “life is confusing. The fact that you recognize your confusion is a blessing, because it is spurring you to the important work of spiritual growth and discovering who you should be.”
When we try to shoot past the complex questions and issues of life and just get to an answer that feels comfortable, or a plan that doesn’t ask too much of us, then we have missed the blessing.
I remember Gilda Radner, from the first years of Saturday Night Live - the sketches she did with Bill Murray, Dan Akroyd, and the rest. She was not only fall-down funny, but just full of warmth and light. When she was just two years married to Gene Wilder she was diagnosed with cancer, and during her illness she wrote a book about her life. At the end of the book she wrote this: “I wanted a perfect ending, so I sat down to write the book with the ending in place before there even was an ending. Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end. My life…is about not knowing, having to change.” She wrote that life was “delicious ambiguity.”[1] I think God can work with that.
Dick Howser played baseball in the major leagues and went on to manage the Yankees and the Royals. His wife Nancy used to say “it doesn’t matter whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game.” I remember learning that myself as a child. And Dick would say to her, “that’s very nice, but in the real world, you’ve got to win.”
Then he got two brain tumors, and had to resign from baseball, and life wasn’t so certain anymore. Looking back, Dick and Nancy saw that the real world had taught them “blessed are those who believe in themselves for theirs is the kingdom of success. But two tumors taught him that “the gospel of self-sufficiency needs to move over and give room to divine dependence.”[2]
The events of good Friday and Easter morning, the death of Jesus and his resurrection, break apart the easy answers we knew before and leave us in a state of confusion. What will happen next, we wonder, as the women leave the tomb, speaking to no one?
But the answer is right here. The conclusion to Mark’s gospel answers that question, not with words printed on the page, but in the very act of our reading and hearing it at all. We wonder if they were ever able to share their story, but we are hearing their story, which means that they must have told it, and it means that you and I are a part of it. We are the answer to Mark’s cliffhanger, because here we are, on Easter Sunday, and now we are a part of the story. We must wonder what will come next for us.
Saint John Chrysostom, the bishop of Constantinople in the 4th century, invited people to be a part of Easter in this way:
“Whoever you are, come, celebrate this shining happening, this festival of life.
Let everybody, therefore, crowd into the exhilaration of our savior.
You the first and you the last, equally heaped with blessings.
You the rich and you the poor, celebrate together.
You the careful and you the careless, enjoy this day of days.
You who have kept the fast and you that have broken it, be happy this day.
The table is loaded. Feast on it like princes, because no one need fear death, for our savior himself has died and set us free. He confronted death in his own person and blasted it to nothing.
Poor death, where is your sting? Poor hell, where is your triumph?
Christ steps out of the tomb and you are reduced to nothing.
Christ rises and the angels are wild with delight.
Christ rises and life is set free.
Christ rises and the graves are emptied of dead.”[3]
[1] Gilda Radner, It’s Always Something, 1989, page 190.
[2] Quoted by Dr. Richard Wing, sermon titled “The Fifty-first State”
[3] Quoted by Rev. James Wallace on Interfaith Voices radio program, March 19, 2008.
Mark 16:1-8
Dedicated to my wife Betsy; and always to the glory of God.
Years ago in Disneyland there was an attraction called Circle-vision which showed movies on a 360 degree screen. Before the show, a host would point out to the audience the state flags that were hung on the walls. One by one they were lit up to see if the audience could identify it, and to welcome anyone who was visiting from that state. After awhile, the light would shine on a very unusual flag covered with strange symbols, and the host would say “and what state is this?” Silence. “This flag,” he said, “is for the state of confusion.”
The state of confusion: what a terrible place to be. We don’t like confusion. We want to know where we are and where we are going. Confusion is not something that we can settle into for very long.
The gospel according to Mark, like all ancient writings, was copied by hand in order to be reproduced and circulated, and we have several copies from early centuries. The ending of the gospel presents us with a puzzle. The women come to the empty tomb, where they learn from an angelic messenger that Jesus isn’t there, that he has risen. He tells them to “go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.” Then, Mark tells us, “they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”
That’s how the gospel ends in the earliest manuscripts. No appearance of the risen Jesus. Nothing about the women ever speaking up. No further mention of the disciples, who fled when Jesus was arrested in the garden and haven’t been seen since, except for Peter who followed long enough to deny that he ever knew Jesus. Mark just ends with the message of Easter being proclaimed to these women, and them fleeing the tomb in terror and amazement, not saying a thing.
That’s not a comfortable ending. If that ending showed up in Hollywood, the studio would make a new one. And, in a way, that’s just what happened. When we read manuscripts that come from later decades and centuries, another paragraph follows the confusing ending we just heard. In this ending, the risen Jesus appears to Mary Magdalene, to two disciples on a country road, and to the eleven disciples gathered at a table, which is kind of a summary of the stories from the other gospels. We can’t go back and discover exactly why the extra ending began to appear in copies of Mark, but a prevailing theory, the one that makes most sense to me, is that someone was too uncomfortable with the confusion caused by that ending. What was the risen Jesus like? What did he say and do? How do we explain what happened? And, if the women were afraid to speak, then how did anyone learn their story in the first place?
Someone wanted a cleaner ending, and we may want a cleaner ending. We may want Easter to just make sense, to have clear applications for our lives. But there us a danger to oversimplifying our lives. Life is too complex and unpredictable to be boiled down to easy lessons, or simplistic definitions right and wrong, good and bad. I think we need Mark’s telling of the Easter story because it leaves us in the state of confusion. It leaves us in that tension of not being able to understand exactly what Easter means, not knowing exactly what we are supposed to feel, or think, or do about it. And that’s ok. There is a blessing in the state of confusion.
The psychologist M. Scott Peck, who wrote that great book The Road Less Traveled, and many others, remembered people who would come to him for counseling, and when he asked them what was troubling them, they would say “I’m confused!”
Scott would say “congratulations, that’s wonderful!”
That’s not really what you want to hear from your counselor.
“It’s not wonderful – it’s terrible! I don’t know what my life has meant, or what I’m supposed to do next. The things I thought were important haven’t worked out and I have nothing to hold on to anymore. I’m confused, and it is painful and difficult!”
Then Scott would say something like this: “life is confusing. The fact that you recognize your confusion is a blessing, because it is spurring you to the important work of spiritual growth and discovering who you should be.”
When we try to shoot past the complex questions and issues of life and just get to an answer that feels comfortable, or a plan that doesn’t ask too much of us, then we have missed the blessing.
I remember Gilda Radner, from the first years of Saturday Night Live - the sketches she did with Bill Murray, Dan Akroyd, and the rest. She was not only fall-down funny, but just full of warmth and light. When she was just two years married to Gene Wilder she was diagnosed with cancer, and during her illness she wrote a book about her life. At the end of the book she wrote this: “I wanted a perfect ending, so I sat down to write the book with the ending in place before there even was an ending. Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end. My life…is about not knowing, having to change.” She wrote that life was “delicious ambiguity.”[1] I think God can work with that.
Dick Howser played baseball in the major leagues and went on to manage the Yankees and the Royals. His wife Nancy used to say “it doesn’t matter whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game.” I remember learning that myself as a child. And Dick would say to her, “that’s very nice, but in the real world, you’ve got to win.”
Then he got two brain tumors, and had to resign from baseball, and life wasn’t so certain anymore. Looking back, Dick and Nancy saw that the real world had taught them “blessed are those who believe in themselves for theirs is the kingdom of success. But two tumors taught him that “the gospel of self-sufficiency needs to move over and give room to divine dependence.”[2]
The events of good Friday and Easter morning, the death of Jesus and his resurrection, break apart the easy answers we knew before and leave us in a state of confusion. What will happen next, we wonder, as the women leave the tomb, speaking to no one?
But the answer is right here. The conclusion to Mark’s gospel answers that question, not with words printed on the page, but in the very act of our reading and hearing it at all. We wonder if they were ever able to share their story, but we are hearing their story, which means that they must have told it, and it means that you and I are a part of it. We are the answer to Mark’s cliffhanger, because here we are, on Easter Sunday, and now we are a part of the story. We must wonder what will come next for us.
Saint John Chrysostom, the bishop of Constantinople in the 4th century, invited people to be a part of Easter in this way:
“Whoever you are, come, celebrate this shining happening, this festival of life.
Let everybody, therefore, crowd into the exhilaration of our savior.
You the first and you the last, equally heaped with blessings.
You the rich and you the poor, celebrate together.
You the careful and you the careless, enjoy this day of days.
You who have kept the fast and you that have broken it, be happy this day.
The table is loaded. Feast on it like princes, because no one need fear death, for our savior himself has died and set us free. He confronted death in his own person and blasted it to nothing.
Poor death, where is your sting? Poor hell, where is your triumph?
Christ steps out of the tomb and you are reduced to nothing.
Christ rises and the angels are wild with delight.
Christ rises and life is set free.
Christ rises and the graves are emptied of dead.”[3]
[1] Gilda Radner, It’s Always Something, 1989, page 190.
[2] Quoted by Dr. Richard Wing, sermon titled “The Fifty-first State”
[3] Quoted by Rev. James Wallace on Interfaith Voices radio program, March 19, 2008.
Thursday, March 13, 2008
Sermon - The Promise of Life
Preached on March 9, 2008, the fifth Sunday in Lent, at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, UCC
Ezekiel 34:1-14 John11:32-45
Dedicated in memoriam to my Uncle Michael; and always to the glory of God.
The vision that Ezekiel had about new life given to the people who lay as dry bones in the valley speaks to us of the resurrection, the promise of life that follows the death we all must pass through.
The Reverend Frederick Buechner wrote about death in a book called The Eyes of the Heart. In it, he contemplates his own death and remembers those who have gone before him, including his mother, who was never a person to speak or think much about such matters of God or eternal life. But one day near the end of her life, Buechner remembers, “when in the midst of some conversation we were having about nothing in particular she suddenly turned to me and said out of the blue, ‘Do you really believe anything happens after you die?’”
That’s a question to which one might give a very nuanced, theological answer; however, since his mother’s hearing had gotten so bad that he had to say things at the top of his lungs, he simply said “YES, SOMETHING HAPPENS.”[1]
Why do we believe that something happens? Why do we believe that death is but the final station on the way to eternal life? Buechner gives three reasons, and I believe they are well worth our attention today. First, he writes, “I believe it because, if I were God and loved the people I created and wanted them to become at last the best they had it in them to be, I couldn’t imagine consigning them to oblivion when their time came with the job under the best of circumstances only a fraction done.”
I remember from my days at Miami University the men who would stand out on the sidewalks on the busiest section of campus near the student union and the central academic quad, handing out their little religious tracts, which told stories about college students who died before their time and found themselves in hell because they had not said the right words to the right God at the right time. They were illustrated with cartoon drawings and annotated with verses from the Bible. We used to take those back to the dorm and make jokes about them. And then they passed out a new tract about students who heard these street preachers and then made fun of them, and then they died and were sent to hell. I guess they knew what we were doing.
It’s an old strategy that goes back to tent revival meetings. Garrison Keillor told a story about this kind of revival once on his radio show Prairie Home Companion. He talked about going to the revival as a young boy, and the preacher told a kid who had refused to accept God at a revival meeting. Then, on the way home, a train crossing signal wasn’t working and his soul was ushered into eternity, his life ended, unsaved by God. Garrison Keillor said that as he listened to the preacher, he thought long and hard about whether there was a train crossing on his way home that night.
I think Buechner is right. Would a loving God consign us to hell, or to nothing, after all this is done? The problem is that this picture does not match up with the character I see in Jesus, and the life of Jesus is the best that I know about God. I cannot believe that the mercy and power of God, which are so great, would end at our death.
Buechner gives a second reason to believe that there is new life beyond the grave: “I believe it, apart from any religious convictions, because I have a hunch it is true. I intuit it,” he writes. Here’s the thing: we know that this life is grossly unfair. There are rich and poor, lucky and unlucky, victims who suffer greatly and oppressors who live in luxury. We know that this world is witness to severe injustice, and if that’s all there is, then life is a black comedy, and the only appropriate feeling about life is cynicism. But, Buechner continues, life doesn’t feel like a black comedy. It feels like mystery – it feels like, at the center of life, there is holiness. If we were truly cynical, we wouldn’t even mourn the horrors of the world, we’d just say “well, what else did you expect?”
I think that we all have a hunch there must be something more because this can’t be all that there is. There is too much broken in life that must be made whole, too much that must be restored and honored and loved. We have hunch, deep down, that there must be more.
Thornton Wilder said as much in his play Our Town. In the words of the stage manager, who oversees this story about Grovers Corners and reflects on what it means, Wilder wrote “Now there are some things we all know, but we don’t take’m out and look at’m very often. We all know that something is eternal. And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names, and it ain’t even the stars…everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people who ever lived have been telling us that for five thousand years and yet you’d be surprised how people are always losing hold of it.”[2]
We live in a world of evidence, and empirical proof, but we shouldn’t be too quick to ignore the hunch we have, and the holiness that we experience. It cannot be so easily dismissed.
The third reason Buechner gives for believing that after we die we aren’t dead forever is “because Jesus said so.” I suppose this reason will be more or less convincing depending on what people think of Jesus. People are free to hear Ezekiel’s vision of the bones being restored to life and write it off as a nice dream. We are free to hear the story of Lazarus raised from the tomb and write if off as wishful thinking, or magical fiction. But as we prepare next week to follow Jesus into Jerusalem, to watch as he calmly walks toward his own death, without a single note of hatred in his voice for those who crucify him, I find myself trusting his promise of life.
We could stop right there and let that be all, but I think that we would be stopping too soon, because life after death is not all that God seeks to give us. Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones is a wonderful reminder of the promise of new life after death, but that is not the only meaning of his vision, and we need to listen closely to this passage, and to the place and time in which Ezekiel lived. Ezekiel is writing to his people in the sixth century before Christ. Israel lies in ruins, Jerusalem has been toppled and torched by the conquering army of Babylon, and Israel’s people have been scattered or taken into exile to the east. Ezekiel’s vision is of a people, a nation, who have been devastated, and long for a return to their homeland, their freedom, and to each other. They still have life, but they feel as though they are nothing but bones, scattered in a distant valley.
In his vision, God tells Ezekiel to call on the breath to restore life to those dry bones, to he people in exile. That word, breath, is repeated seven times in this vision, and we need to know that the Hebrew word for breath, “ruah,” also means wind, and also means spirit. This is a vision about being restored by the spirit of God, and that has to do with our lives right now. You see, there is the life that ends when our breathing stops, and then there is the spiritual life that dies when the spirit of God does not breathe within us. We cannot come to worship and speak only of the life that God gives after death, and then act as if God has nothing to do with us until we die.
Ezekiel’s people had suffered the loss of their home, their place of worship, their freedom and their security. Much like having the wind knocked out of you after a bad fall, the spirit had been knocked out of them just as the spirit is often knocked out of all of us by the loss and struggle along our paths.
Let us remember that at the center of life is holiness. Beyond all that is broken in this world, all that is unfair and incomplete, at the innermost place of existence and truth, life is holy. Let God breathe that spirit into us, that we may know that we walk on holy ground, and that the space around us is sacred space.
[1] Buechner, Frederick, 1999. The Eyes of the Heart. All references to Buechner are found on pages 14-16.
[2] Wilder, Thornton, 1938. Our Town, page 81.
Ezekiel 34:1-14 John11:32-45
Dedicated in memoriam to my Uncle Michael; and always to the glory of God.
The vision that Ezekiel had about new life given to the people who lay as dry bones in the valley speaks to us of the resurrection, the promise of life that follows the death we all must pass through.
The Reverend Frederick Buechner wrote about death in a book called The Eyes of the Heart. In it, he contemplates his own death and remembers those who have gone before him, including his mother, who was never a person to speak or think much about such matters of God or eternal life. But one day near the end of her life, Buechner remembers, “when in the midst of some conversation we were having about nothing in particular she suddenly turned to me and said out of the blue, ‘Do you really believe anything happens after you die?’”
That’s a question to which one might give a very nuanced, theological answer; however, since his mother’s hearing had gotten so bad that he had to say things at the top of his lungs, he simply said “YES, SOMETHING HAPPENS.”[1]
Why do we believe that something happens? Why do we believe that death is but the final station on the way to eternal life? Buechner gives three reasons, and I believe they are well worth our attention today. First, he writes, “I believe it because, if I were God and loved the people I created and wanted them to become at last the best they had it in them to be, I couldn’t imagine consigning them to oblivion when their time came with the job under the best of circumstances only a fraction done.”
I remember from my days at Miami University the men who would stand out on the sidewalks on the busiest section of campus near the student union and the central academic quad, handing out their little religious tracts, which told stories about college students who died before their time and found themselves in hell because they had not said the right words to the right God at the right time. They were illustrated with cartoon drawings and annotated with verses from the Bible. We used to take those back to the dorm and make jokes about them. And then they passed out a new tract about students who heard these street preachers and then made fun of them, and then they died and were sent to hell. I guess they knew what we were doing.
It’s an old strategy that goes back to tent revival meetings. Garrison Keillor told a story about this kind of revival once on his radio show Prairie Home Companion. He talked about going to the revival as a young boy, and the preacher told a kid who had refused to accept God at a revival meeting. Then, on the way home, a train crossing signal wasn’t working and his soul was ushered into eternity, his life ended, unsaved by God. Garrison Keillor said that as he listened to the preacher, he thought long and hard about whether there was a train crossing on his way home that night.
I think Buechner is right. Would a loving God consign us to hell, or to nothing, after all this is done? The problem is that this picture does not match up with the character I see in Jesus, and the life of Jesus is the best that I know about God. I cannot believe that the mercy and power of God, which are so great, would end at our death.
Buechner gives a second reason to believe that there is new life beyond the grave: “I believe it, apart from any religious convictions, because I have a hunch it is true. I intuit it,” he writes. Here’s the thing: we know that this life is grossly unfair. There are rich and poor, lucky and unlucky, victims who suffer greatly and oppressors who live in luxury. We know that this world is witness to severe injustice, and if that’s all there is, then life is a black comedy, and the only appropriate feeling about life is cynicism. But, Buechner continues, life doesn’t feel like a black comedy. It feels like mystery – it feels like, at the center of life, there is holiness. If we were truly cynical, we wouldn’t even mourn the horrors of the world, we’d just say “well, what else did you expect?”
I think that we all have a hunch there must be something more because this can’t be all that there is. There is too much broken in life that must be made whole, too much that must be restored and honored and loved. We have hunch, deep down, that there must be more.
Thornton Wilder said as much in his play Our Town. In the words of the stage manager, who oversees this story about Grovers Corners and reflects on what it means, Wilder wrote “Now there are some things we all know, but we don’t take’m out and look at’m very often. We all know that something is eternal. And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names, and it ain’t even the stars…everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people who ever lived have been telling us that for five thousand years and yet you’d be surprised how people are always losing hold of it.”[2]
We live in a world of evidence, and empirical proof, but we shouldn’t be too quick to ignore the hunch we have, and the holiness that we experience. It cannot be so easily dismissed.
The third reason Buechner gives for believing that after we die we aren’t dead forever is “because Jesus said so.” I suppose this reason will be more or less convincing depending on what people think of Jesus. People are free to hear Ezekiel’s vision of the bones being restored to life and write it off as a nice dream. We are free to hear the story of Lazarus raised from the tomb and write if off as wishful thinking, or magical fiction. But as we prepare next week to follow Jesus into Jerusalem, to watch as he calmly walks toward his own death, without a single note of hatred in his voice for those who crucify him, I find myself trusting his promise of life.
We could stop right there and let that be all, but I think that we would be stopping too soon, because life after death is not all that God seeks to give us. Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones is a wonderful reminder of the promise of new life after death, but that is not the only meaning of his vision, and we need to listen closely to this passage, and to the place and time in which Ezekiel lived. Ezekiel is writing to his people in the sixth century before Christ. Israel lies in ruins, Jerusalem has been toppled and torched by the conquering army of Babylon, and Israel’s people have been scattered or taken into exile to the east. Ezekiel’s vision is of a people, a nation, who have been devastated, and long for a return to their homeland, their freedom, and to each other. They still have life, but they feel as though they are nothing but bones, scattered in a distant valley.
In his vision, God tells Ezekiel to call on the breath to restore life to those dry bones, to he people in exile. That word, breath, is repeated seven times in this vision, and we need to know that the Hebrew word for breath, “ruah,” also means wind, and also means spirit. This is a vision about being restored by the spirit of God, and that has to do with our lives right now. You see, there is the life that ends when our breathing stops, and then there is the spiritual life that dies when the spirit of God does not breathe within us. We cannot come to worship and speak only of the life that God gives after death, and then act as if God has nothing to do with us until we die.
Ezekiel’s people had suffered the loss of their home, their place of worship, their freedom and their security. Much like having the wind knocked out of you after a bad fall, the spirit had been knocked out of them just as the spirit is often knocked out of all of us by the loss and struggle along our paths.
Let us remember that at the center of life is holiness. Beyond all that is broken in this world, all that is unfair and incomplete, at the innermost place of existence and truth, life is holy. Let God breathe that spirit into us, that we may know that we walk on holy ground, and that the space around us is sacred space.
[1] Buechner, Frederick, 1999. The Eyes of the Heart. All references to Buechner are found on pages 14-16.
[2] Wilder, Thornton, 1938. Our Town, page 81.
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